Enterprise software systems receive, generate and store data related to many aspects of a business enterprise. These systems may provide reporting, planning, and/or analysis of the data based on logical entities known as dimensions and measures. Dimensions represent sets of values (i.e., members) along which an analysis may be performed or a report may be generated (e.g., Country, Year, Product), and measures are indicators, most often numeric, whose values can be determined for a given combination of dimension members. For example, a value of the Sales measure may be determined for bicycles (i.e., a member of the Product dimension) in January (i.e., a member of the Month dimension).
The interrelationships between dimension members and measure values are complex and multi-faceted. These interrelationships inhibit manipulation and/or synthesis of disparate measure values. Moreover, due to the foregoing, current systems fail to provide efficient usage of dimension-dependent measures across heterogeneous software applications.